Boulder Bach Festival and the Dairy present orchestral program Sunday

By Peter Alexander April 3 at 5:25 p.m.

Co-presenters Boulder Bach Festival (BBF) and the Dairy Arts Center join together for an orchestral program of wide variety and styles, concluding the BBF’s 2024–25 concert season.

The program, titled “Wheel of Time,” will be performed Sunday in the Dairy’s Gordon Gamm Theater (4 p.m. April 6; details below). The performance features the BBF’s conductorless chamber orchestra, COmpass REsonance (CORE). Soloists will be the BBF’s music director, Zachary Carrettin, violin; Mina Gajic, piano; and Mara Riley, soprano and flute.

The program features works from the 18th to the 21st centuries, including the first Colorado performance of Overture for a Changing World by Carrettin. Riley will sing two arias, one a sonnet by Petrarch set by Maria Teresa Agnesi Pinottini, an 18th-century Italian composer, singer and harpsichordist; and the other from an opera by Vivaldi. Riley will also appear with CORE as the flute soloist in a performance of J.S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 5.

The other work on the program is Ernest Bloch’s Concerto Grosso No. 1 for piano and string orchestra, featuring Gajic as soloist. Composed in 1925, the Concerto Grosso has an interesting origin. At the time, Bloch was director of the Cleveland Institute of Music, where many students were skeptical of “old” techniques in music, including classical forms and tonality.

Bloch decided to respond to their skepticism by writing a new piece that used a classical form, the concerto grosso, and tonality in a contemporary way. He gave the new piece to the school orchestra, who read it with interest. According to legend, after the reading, Bloch said to the students, “What do you think now?”

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“Wheel of Time”
Boulder Bach Festival COmpass REsonance, Zachary Carrettin, music director
With Mara Riley, soprano and flute, and Mina Gajic, piano

• Zachary Carrettin: Overture for a Changing World
• Maria Teresa Adnesi: Non piangete
• Ernest Bloch: Concerto Grosso No. 1 for piano and string orchestra
• Vivaldi: Aria from La verity in cement (Truth in contention)
• J.S. Bach: Brandenburg Concerto No. 5

4 p.m. Sunday, April 6, Gordon Gamm Theater, Dairy Arts Center

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